Recent work in demography and epidemiology has emphasized the importance of early life experiences for mortality and longevity. Research in this area has been hampered by a lack of data at the individual level covering a sufficiently long time to measure both early experiences and mortality in later life. This project will use population register data from a Belgian village covering most of the nineteenth century to examine the effects of community, household, and individual-level measures of food scarcity and disease exposure in early childhood on mortality in adult ages.